Share This Page

From first glances at the game, Starsky and Hutch seems like a horribly made game made to profit from the movie sales of the then recently released new Starksy and Hutch movie. This could be farther from the truth. The game Starsky and Hutch is about 2 crime fighting cops working as a team to stop any and all crimes going down. You receive reports of crimes going down and you stop them. These crimes seem connected to each other, and through the use of your #1 informat, Huggy Bear, you get the lowdown on what the big drug scandal is, or the big plot of the evil genius mastermind. You play through various “episodes” of 4 separate “seasons”, giving a lot of missions to be beaten, as well as 2 player co-op, free roam mode, and racing and trick extra objectives. Each episode has a primary and secondary objective to get done.

The gameplay of Starsky and Hutch is extremely original and has not been copied thus far. You drive around in the striped tomato, chasing criminals and blowing up stuff. The camera constantly tilts and dives according to your turning and the action going on, also going into a cinematic angle for slow motion action shots, precursor to Burnout Paridise’s showtime mode it seems. Your health is measured in a very peculiar way, as viewer ratings. Since Starsky and Hutch was an old TV show, the developers decided that “The better you do, the higher the ratings, and get to low, and you’re cancelled.” It’s a strange, yet original gameplay element. This rating is directly affected by certain things, shooting any and all shootable things (besides pedestrian cars) will cause your ranking to go up. These include lightposts, mailboxes, signs, gas stations, barrels (explosives), boxes, tanks, stoplights… oh and I guess you’re also supposed to shoot the criminals getting away in their cars. You also raise your VR ranking by narrowly dodging traffic, shooting VR bonuses in the sky, running them over in your car, or slamming your car against the criminal’s car. Your rating decreases if you hit immovable objects (like buildings), if you get shot at by the criminals (both in cars and standing on the sidewalk), if you hit traffic, if you run over predestrians (I don’t see how their rating would go down for that though…), and your ratings gradually decrease over time, like a time limit.

Hope you shot that boost!

Shooting is controlled by auto targeting the nearest object you can shoot, which helps a lot in nailing stunts and aiming for bonuses. Enemy cars can take a LOT of hits before dieing, and you sometimes got to kill them before they leave city limits, why you can’t chase after them further than that? Well because no one animated outside city limits, that’s why. Powerups float over head, with plenty of bonuses to choose from, act quickly enough, and you can get them all. These powerups include:

-Speed boosts-very useful
-Extra traction-very un-useful
-VR bonuses-necessary for surviving the level
-Double damage-useful in the right situation
-Siren-removes traffic which may seem unnoticeable, but helps (one has to wonder why you can’t keep the siren on though…)
-Take two-gives you your last bonus again

You have a wide variety of guns you can pick up, but they are mostly hidden and hard to get while driving after the criminals, but these guns are increases in power than your wimpy starting pistol, which luckily has unlimited ammo. These new guns last until your ammo runs out, and the most useful guns really are just the shotgun (most powerful) and the Uzi (Automatic Baby!)

Spread frequently throughout the level are special events that allow you to enter the game’s showtime-esque mode, slowing down time and causing cool camera angles. Sometimes these events make cars crash or things blowup, which if timed just right causes a very awesome hit on the car your chasing.

Wah-HEY!

The multiplayer of the game is very fun to experience, so bring a friend. The friend controls the shooting (auto aim is off you can shoot at whatever you want), and you control simply the steering (or the other way around). The game can even be played with a steering wheel/pedals, or even using a light gun for the shooter.

But the REAL reason why this game is so great is how horrible it is. The game graphics admittedly are horrible, models have blocks for fingers and are very fun to laugh at. Though the effort put into special effects is much appreciated. The game tries to put in humor, but it fails so bad, it’s very funny. The horrible lines played in gameplay are repeated over and over and are so funny to hear:

The cut scenes are comics that move occasionally, and look very odd to look at, sometime Starsky leans in a Bit too close to Hutch… promoting more laughter at how horrible it looks.

The concepts are crazy, chasing down a bus full of escaping convicts, who can somehow throw an unlimited amount of bombs at you, to chasing a couple on a yellow Motor-Trike who just before blew up a bank. The physics are a laughing matter as well, you’re car can hardly take damage, even when being slammed into by a train dozens of times. Flipping the trike upside down is no obstacle for the couple, they just flip back up. Even every level is beten by destroying whatever car(s) you are chasing by putting so many bullets in it until it EXPLODES.

For these reasons, I give Starsky and Hutch my approval of an awesome game.